PROLOGUE​(from 'So You're Going to be a Dad')

Being a dad has its advantages and disadvantages. Advantages · A decade, guaranteed, of guilt-free Disney/Pixar animated movies on the big screen. · Rediscovering your love of Lego. · Social kudos in your workplace, especially among women. · People usher you to the front of queues. · You can break wind anytime, anyplace and blame it on the baby. · The joyous fulfilment of playing a significant part in the life of another human being. Disadvantages · Life, as you know it, is over. This is a book about being a dad. I wrote it for three reasons. First, I wanted to become the rich and famous author of a book with one of those ‘Three Million Now in Print’ stickers on it. (That didn’t exactly come to fruition. However, I have sold over a hundred thousand copies, and with the publishing royalties I have been able to put a full set of new tyres on my Tarago. On at least three separate occasions. Yay.) Second, I’m writing this book to warn you. Becoming a dad is life-changing. Monumentally, teeth-crackingly, awe-inspiringly life-changing. Somebody needs to tell you. It might as well be me. My wife, Meredith, and I are the proud parents of three daughters: Rachael, Georgia and Matilda. And I do mean proud. I love my kids. I love being their dad. Except for that time Rachael redecorated her room by pulling the cap off a container of baby powder. And except for that time when, during a dinner party, Georgia appeared pants-less and clutching a nuggety shape, causing one of our dinner guests to ask, incorrectly, ‘Where’d ya get that pine cone, Georgie?’ And especially except for that time Tilly ran through a plate-glass door wearing only silky pyjamas, sending us scurrying to the hospital in one of those ‘Please God’ moments. Yep, there’s nothing quite like being a dad. I consider myself a fully fledged family man. Being a dad is really important to me. It is at the very core of who I am. But it was a bit of a rocky beginning and I certainly wouldn’t claim to have enjoyed every minute of it. As a new dad, I remember crawling into bed each night mumbling inanely to myself, Why didn’t anybody tell me about this? Why wasn’t I warned? Can I change my mind about this whole dad thing? I remember feeling angry that I had subscribed to an ideal that being a dad was easy and fun and full of warmth and wonder and soft-focus, TV-commercial moments made up of throwing a ball in the park and cooking snags around a campfire in the backyard. I felt miffed that the brotherhood-of-blokes had failed to adequately and truthfully prepare me for my new station in life. Then again . . . it wouldn’t be the first time the brotherhood-of-blokes has let me down and been misleading. It is they, after all, who also suggest that paintball doesn’t hurt, that getting a stripper is a good way to finish a bucks’ night or that getting a fully sick Chinese character tatt on your bicep while on holiday in Phuket is a good idea. Becoming a dad is a shock to the system. It’s not like getting a new car or wide-screen TV. So I’m writing to give you the lowdown, the scoop, the big picture, the rope-a-dope, the man-in-the-street, bloke-next-door view. Third, I have a strong conviction about the importance of dadhood. Our country needs good dads. Our kids need good dads. They need their dads to love them, care for them, know them, teach them, raise them, spend time with them, discipline them, throw them up in the air and wrestle them on the carpet. It makes me happy that lots of men take an active and involved role in family life. Unfortunately, some blokes still view parenting as a maternal thing. They see their role as bread-winner and beer-drinker. This is a tragedy. As far as I can ascertain, there are only five parenting things that men can’t do: · get pregnant · carry a baby for nine months · give birth · breastfeed · remember the names of all the kids at playgroup. As a culture, we still tend to define ourselves by the work we do, and that can lead some men to get the balance wrong. I have met dads who are not into family stuff, dads who seem permanently away on business, dads who are perpetually busy and are so wrapped up in their own lives that they and their children only ever pass like ships in the night. They are men with no time for family. I was leafing through a stack of old magazines the other day when I came across an article on the new breed of workaholics in Australia: men who seem to live for their work and have little or no time for their own kids. It’s my belief that, one day, these men will wake up and look at their children who don’t know them . . . and realise too late that there is more to life than work. So, in writing this book, I hope that I help some blokes – maybe you? – realise how important and how enjoyable (albeit sometimes frustrating) it is to be ‘Dad’.But how exactly do you ‘be a dad’? Good question. Unfortunately, us blokes can’t go to TAFE to get a Certificate IV in Fathering and, as far as I know, universities don’t offer Bachelor degrees in Paternity. How do we, as aspiring fathers-to-be, learn the ropes of fathering without hanging ourselves, so to speak?When Meredith was pregnant with our first child, Rachael, I had a thousand questions that needed answering. There were plans to be made and things to do, and I knew nothing about babies and parenting and kids. And I do mean nothing. I needed information and advice to help me work out, essentially, what is it exactly that I’m supposed to do? I started looking for decent books that would prepare me for parenting. You can spot these books by their promising titles, such as The Complete Guide to Parenting . . . or How to Raise a Child . . . or Ten Easy Steps to . . . Either that or by their covers, which feature soft-focus photos of models (with pregnancy-suggesting cushions stuffed up their cashmere cardigans) silhouetted in frosted bay windows staring out to the middle distance with a serene look on their face that says, ‘I’m pregnant and I’m in love with my baby . . .’ I have to say, I didn’t find too many books that really did the trick. Most are written for women, many adopting a kind of alternate-reality saccharine insipidness to which I could not relate. The few dad books I stumbled across (squeezed in among other non-male books such as Your Breast, Your Baby or Terrifically Trim After Childbirth) were sort of okay but tended to be either dry and technical textbooks (which put me to sleep) or clichéd dad collages with inspirational desktop-calendar quotations (which were cute – ‘A father carries photos where his money used to be’ – but didn’t actually tell me anything). Somewhere in there, I decided to write this. Which raises the question: who exactly is Peter Downey to be telling me about all this stuff anyway? Well, I’m not a child psychologist, bioethicist, obstetrician or paediatrician. I’m not the head of some amazing parent-education organisation. And although I’m a ‘Doctor’, my Doctorate is in education not medicine, which means I am perpetually anxious that on a long-haul flight an attendant will call out, ‘Is anyone here a doctor?’ and I’ll put up my hand but, despite my attempts to qualify that statement, I’ll be whisked to the back of the plane, there to conduct a Caesarean with nothing but airline cutlery and a plastic sewing kit, and afterwards we’ll all have a good old laugh about the misunderstanding. My main qualification is that I’m an ordinary bloke, husband and dad of three kids. I live in the suburbs, work five days a week, wash the car on the weekend and like to watch movies and get Thai takeaway on a Friday night. One day, I was a normal, carefree guy, just like you. The next day, I was buying nappies and trying to assemble a travel cot. If anything, it is my inadequacies and failings, not my expertise, that makes this book what it is. So here I am, a few years down the track, ready to share my joys, frustrations, ideas and mistakes. If that doesn’t convince you, though, I’ve watched plenty of films and TV shows with dads and babies in them. The basic message of this book is that being a dad takes energy, commitment and involvement. It takes a lot of time and effort. You can’t do it half-heartedly. You can’t do it in your spare time. This is very important for you to understand, so I’m going to write it again. Being a dad takes energy, commitment and involvement. It takes a lot of time and effort. You can’t do it half-heartedly. You can’t do it in your spare time. It means being active and involved in the daily dealings with your baby. It means ‘getting your hands dirty’ – metaphorically and literally – and participating in all aspects of family life. It means sharing the parenting and rejecting outdated stereotypes that parenting is ‘women’s business’. If you haven’t got the point yet, read this paragraph again. Our kids need us. Your baby, whether you’ve met it yet or not, needs you. It needs your testosterone, your love, care, concern, involvement, wisdom, strength, patience and discipline. It needs your strong arm and your gentle hand. It needs you to be there, to be involved, and you’ve got to know them, know when to hold them, and know when to fold them . . . hang on a sec . . . Obviously, this book is primarily intended for soon-to-be or new dads, the Australian male who knows little or nothing about fatherhood but who wants to face the storm and be the best damn dad he can be. But the absence of discussion here around mums or particular maternal issues should in no way lessen the obvious importance of mums or detract from the integral relationship of the husband–wife parenting team. Mums are equally important as dads. I have nothing against women. In fact, I like women. I even married one. So welcome to the wonderful world of fatherhood. We have a long road ahead of us. A hard road. A road fraught with obstacles, trials and tribulations. But it is also a rewarding road, adorned with great experiences and golden moments that you wouldn’t have thought possible. And once you walk the road, you’ll never be the same again. So, good luck on your journey. You’ll need it.